Stangala - Boued Tousek Hag Traou Mat All (2011)

When you fancy a certain band enough its really only natural to dig deeper into the members musical involvement and see what else they/them/he/she/whatever are partaking in. In this case, my appreciation for the Brittany, France based band, Netra, got me curious to see what band mastermind, Steven Le Moan was also up to. Turns out he's the guitarist/vocalist of a tasty 'lil outfit calling themselves, Stangala.

Stangala offers up their own interesting twist to the stoner/doom metal/rock sub-genre by including a strong Celtic influence throughout, as well as, with traits of psychedelic rock, hard rock, jazz, ambient, ethnic and minor drone characteristics, Boued Tousek Hag Traou Mat All makes for a wild ride. They also write all of their lyrics in the Breton language, which is some sort of Celtic dialect, and unlike the rest of the internet I had to look that up.

The songs themselves are quite good, too; catchy guitar and bass riffs, clever solos, plenty of groove, heaviness and just good 'ol fun is to be had on this record, plus figure in the Celtic influences, which come in the form of bagpipes on a few songs. Doom Rock Glazik creates some sort of mental image of stoned dancing druids performing mischievous tasks deep in the forest, while, Sorcerezed is all-out heavy mushroom munching weirdness, with both slow and speedier parts, and Bigoudened An Diaoul is more stoner rock, fetching like you couldn't even imagine, and sort of bringing Kyuss to mind for a moment. Izel Eo An Dour is quite good too, with plenty of heaviness, active synths and strange chanting and what not shortly into the song.

There's also a few instrumentals, such as, Kalon An Noz, which is a bunch of bagpipe malarkey, while, Langoliers is a considerably faster free jam meets black metal sort of thing, and the title track is all psychedelic rock heavy groove trippy stuff. Deus Bars An Tan is also interesting since its more of an ambient piece with sparse percussion, distant voices and acoustics initially, eventually becoming quite heavy with howling voices and just an overly hallucinatory feeling.

The recording itself also feels rather vintage, almost convincing me for a moment that the whole thing was recorded over forty years ago in some strange hippie commune deep in the Brittany wilderness.

All ten songs clock in for about sixty seven minutes of music, which is challenging at first due to the albums diversity, but really sinks in after numerous listens. I've heard plenty of stoner/doom bands throughout my life, but few have been as daring and different as Stangala. As such, its pretty much a must to look into this band, especially if you've tired of the genres more typical traits.